NISHASARANISHA models latex Quilted Shoulder Cape and Fluted Dress on the EctoMorph stand at Le Boutique Bazaar, currently on hiatus following venue renovation (photo: Krystina Kitsis)
PU, lads’ mags, Radical Rubber, quilted latex, fet markets
Alongside the club hosting I started to supply lots of boutiques worldwide, ending up with about 40 on my books. I would occasionally visit some of them with stock or to show them new styles.
These were pre-Brexit days when one could export goods easily (to Europe, anyway) without the current nightmare that exporting has become.
One of those outlets was a new shop in Ghent, Belgium, opened by Patrick Degryse and called G-Spot, that sold mainly EctoMorph. It caused rather a stir in the reserved streets of Ghent and provided a rival to Boutique Minuit in Brussels, which I also supplied.
I met so many fetish enthusiasts who either already had sex shops or had recently opened a new shop carrying what became seen as the ‘British invasion’ by designer-led latex.
To make a collection more interesting in the early days, I decided to combine latex with lace and mesh to appear more like streetwear and thereby sell to the fashion-led.
ECTOMORPH has also produced separates in PU-coated stretch fabric with long braid fringing, as featured above by Elle (photo: Wayne Stambler)
This offended the purists among the fetish community who didn’t like this ‘tainting’ of latex with other fabrics. One collection of mine that was not latex but PU (polyurethane-coated stretch fabric) consisted of separates, shorts, dresses and jackets with very long braid fringing, and was featured in Elle magazine.
Lads’ mags change men’s take on fashion
Many magazines styled latex as part of their fashion features. The landscape for men changed with the launch of style magazines directed at them.
It had started in 1985 with For Him, later rebranded as FHM in 1992. The first three editions were distributed free in menswear shops so male customers would not have to admit to being interested in fashion.
FHM’s new business model was designed to sell luxury products through top-end adverts to men who wanted to dress well but not in fashion: a new narrative for a new audience.
Loaded changed things again in 1994, becoming the first lads’ mag. Features on celebrities were accompanied by men behaving badly in quality packaging. Scantily-clad women on its covers became the norm.
As well as being promotional vehicles for us as designers, these magazines changed men’s perception of fashionable clothing.
I originally found it difficult to sell to men. Anything that I designed would be dismissed as looking ‘too gay’. They were happy to buy latex for their girlfriends or wives but it took a lot of persuasion to educate their tastes when purchasing for themselves.
The latex colour palette we originally had available, mainly primaries, was limited by what UK latex manufacturer Four D (aka 4D) Rubber produced, as it had a monopoly on the supply of latex sheeting for clothing.
Radical Rubber breaks 4D’s latex monopoly
LIBIDEX’S 2007 launch of Radical Rubber vastly improved designers’ choice of latex colours, also forcing traditional supplier 4D to up its game
That all changed when Simon Rose at Libidex and his co-director Nigel Walker set up Radical Rubber in 2007 to manufacture latex sheeting in Malaysia.
Radical not only offered a much bigger range of exciting colours — obliging the market leader 4D to follow suit — but was also happy to supply its products in smaller order quantities than 4D’s, which helped to support a lot of budding new latex designers.
More recently — in 2018 — I started to experiment with quilting to see if it was possible to produce quilted latex garments. I was inspired by seeing the fashion collection of quilted, duvet-like coats and huge A-line dresses based on Renaissance themes produced for Moncler by Pierpaolo Piccioli (now Balenciaga’s creative director).
The result was a collection of oversized, exaggerated-shaped quilted pieces, initially created in Bronze, Lime Green, Vibrant Pink and Vibrant Orange latex — colours I normally never worked with.
KRYSTINA’S trademark latex stitching led her to produce a quilted collection, photographed on trans model Blanket, above, by Aidan McCarthy
I worked on the collection and images with photographer Aidan McCarthy, who had originally suggested incorporating the twin themes of exaggerated shapes and block colours then concurrent in fashion. We used Blanket, a trans model, to promote the collection.
Catwalks in fetish clubs, initially in Switzerland, Germany, Holland and France, were another avenue I used to promote EctoMorph. In the UK I have regularly participated since its inception in the annual Mach2 events, both to showcase and sell my designs to latex enthusiasts.
Mach2 ditches some outdated traditions
MACH2’s long adherence to old fetish traditions eventually gave way to modern concepts such as allowing crossdressing! (photo: Krystina Kitsis)
Mach2 started as a spin-off in 1996 from International Mackintosh Society (IMS), whose events from 1986 had featured men in woollen suits watching fellow members (often their wives) parading down a catwalk wearing mackintoshes — nothing else being permitted.
Mach2 was eventually forced to modernise and embrace different gender persuasions, to the extent that in recent years, even crossdressing has been allowed!
But the event’s organisers are still wary of offending their venue’s management, as they actively encourage the wearing of fetish all weekend — when some of the venue staff may be totally unfamiliar with the scene.
Mach2 retains its pre-modern fetish traditions by holding a Saturday morning fashion show during their weekend extravaganza, using members as models, and by offering innocuous workshops like rope demonstrations or a maids’ tea party, a gala dinner and a traders’ market.
Gone are the days of reprimands such as the one I received from the Mach2 chairman when I sent my male helper down the runway dressed as Eve in a newly designed maid’s outfit.
Hard to imagine such prudish notions in any modern fetish club. But this was an evolution this annual event had to go through.
THE FLEAMARKET at one of Eccentric Fashion’s extremely traditional annual gatherings – now defunct since Covid – at a Swiss mountain hotel
Mach2 is closer in character to some of the earlier European events like Switzerland’s Eccentric Fashion and Boutique Fancy in Basle, Kastley in Stuttgart or Dressing For Pleasure in New Jersey.
They all adopted the sort of model that Mach2 continues with. I attended many of these events with my collections that then sold through their shops.
These events were typically run by slightly older enthusiasts who combined their personal obsessions — such as model trains and steam railways in the cases, respectively, of Eccentric Fashion and IMS proprietor Jim Price — with fetish.
Eccentric’s Heinz and Marie Gerbig actually owned a complete miniature railway, and would transport their kinkster guests on it around their hotel-based event in the picturesque Swiss mountains.
So many international events have since surpassed the concept behind the original fetish clubs.
EctoMorph at London’s fetish markets
LAM – London Alternative Market – has suffered a couple of recent venue changes. Its brand new home is Forge, above, in the City of London
Fetish markets aided this spread, starting to flourish in the mid-1990s.
They became not only a great way for the expanding network of fetish companies to sell directly to the public, but also a place where people could meet, exchange information, wear fetish clothes and view new merchandise.
I have sold EctoMorph latex at many of these markets, especially London Alternative Market (launched 2006 ), London Fetish Fair (from 1994) and Le Boutique Bazaar (from 2014).
LAM has been particularly pivotal in promotion and education of the BDSM scene through its monthly markets with their after-parties and workshops.
The fashion scene is known for frenetic internal workings and external demands that force creativity, ultimately leading fashion to fragment into many different strands to meet consumer demands.
Similarly, the ‘perv scene’ has experienced fragmentation into different markets catering for more specialised audiences.
While London Alternative Market (LAM) primarily targets the BDSM scene, Le Boutique Bazaar (LBB), co-hosted by Torture Garden (TG), has more of a kink fashion customer base.
LBB has been on hiatus this year during the renovation of its Shoreditch venue, For Your Eyes Only, and news of its return is still awaited. (Concludes on page 4)
BELOW: EctoMorph stand at Mach2, a traditional fetish weekend in south-west England that started out in 1996 as a spin-off from the International Mackintosh Society’s events (photo: Krystina Kitsis)
Page 3 Galleries: Larger Versions and Bonus Images
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